Vincent Kundukulam
Bryan N. Massingale has developed an interesting insight regarding the backdrop of violence. His thesis is that cultural stereotypes play a leading role in defining human behavior. He argues this stance in the light of the series of killings perpetrated by the police officers and security guards in America against certain blacks Americans in 2012. According to him, the guards who committed those genocides had not been necessarily aware of the seriousness of such a crime because the cultural stereotypes might have operated in them at subconscious level. Studies show that the hidden collective racial stereotypes can control the persons indirectly. People may alter the perception regarding others as the color changes the vision itself.
Masingale bases his study on Bernard Lonergan’s theoretical understanding of culture. To the latter, culture is a set of meanings and values that apprises the community’s way of life. It functions like the soul of social order. And he adds that more than social institutions and laws of nation, culture regulates the ways of ordering a community. It can even control the spirit that animates social institutions and customs. In certain circumstances, people form a mind-set that makes them indifferent to social injustice. When people are pervasively conditioned by exclusivist culture, it can legitimate violence too. Culture has such a deformative power.
Massingale’s emphasis on the unconscious operation of cultural stereotypes in people at the moment of tragic events is to be discussed. His point is that the cultural stigma attached to dark skin color in the Western culture operated negatively in the case of American guards shooting the black. He observes that since many decades, the American psyche has been associating the dark skin with immorality, stupidity and danger. That must be the reason why those American guards did not hesitate for a while to treat cruelly the blacks. It means, the deformed notion about dark people had affected the rational ordering of their conscience, though it was not explicitly taught anywhere in America.
What happened in America is not something exceptional. Such type of killings on the basis of biased cultural presumptions takes place in other countries too but need not be in the field of race. Wherever culture is conditioned by certain beliefs, symbolic codes and values that are perversely formed against the other, the same can happen with regard to communities based on religion, tribe and caste. Study the intermittent inter-religious conflicts that happen in our own country, India. Sudhir Kakkar published almost four decades ago an original work under the title The Colours of Violence in which he analyzes the communal riots in India from psychological point of view. Analyzing the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1990 at Hyderabad, he shows how the religious identity worked unconsciously in Hindus and Muslims during the period of confrontation.
The collective identity is constituted of each person’s feelings and attitudes towards the self as the member of a particular group. Hence, when the self-image of one group is badly hurt, the individuals live it as a damage caused to their own personal interest. Then individual’s feelings, thoughts, fantasies, social representations and even modes of moral reasoning move in a direction of rationalizing any sort of looting, rape and killing of the out-group. The reason for once happened communal riot give birth to further riots is that the image of self and that of the other are constituted during the tragedy is transmitted to future generations through myths, history, and cultural symbols. When similar circumstances arise in society, people forget about the care and sympathy they show to one’s own group and treat the other groups as enemies.
The above-given analysis prompt us to say that learning from culture may turn to be dangerous if we don’t take care to get relieved of the unconscious cultural presumptions it installs in us vis-a-vis the other. The collective and individual unconscious of persons must be cleansed of the venomous potentials constructed against the other so that the ordinary behavior and actions of people are guided by the universal and creative moral views.
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